F-words In Linux Code Get Replaced With “Hugs”

A couple of months ago, Linux creator Linus Torvalds took a brief break from the Linux development process (he’s back) and focus on improving his habit of getting into heated discussions. It was also followed by a new Code of Conducted adopted for code contributors and kernel maintainers.

In a related development, to make the kernel community a welcoming place, Jarkko Sakkinen from Intel pushed a series of changes. These patches have replaced F-words in certain kernel code comments with ‘hug.’

In the mailing list, he wrote:

In order to comply with the CoC, replace **** with a hug.

As a result of this change, for example, some comments have become —

Please stay the hug away from my code

IOC3 is hugging hugged beyond belief

avoid hugging up the memory controller

As per Phoronix, 33 lines out of 3.3 million lines of code have been changed.

In my view, it’s a change that should be welcomed by all the community members as it’ll surely help in filtering out the negativity. It’d also be interesting to see what other offensive words get replaced in the future commits.

What do you think about this change? Share your views and keep reading Fossbytes.